


belief over misery

by Ingi



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Blanket Permission, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Healing, Love, Post-Save Chloe Price Ending, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, not betaed we die like the bay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25369429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ingi/pseuds/Ingi
Summary: The drive through Arcadia Bay is as quiet as loud the storm had been.
Relationships: Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	belief over misery

**Author's Note:**

> .....this just happened. Not like I wanted it to, either. But it happened.
> 
> Title from "This Is Home", by Switchfoot.

The drive through Arcadia Bay is as quiet as loud the storm had been.

Chloe's completely empty, like every feeling has been scooped out and there's only a body that drives drives _drives_ somewhere, and she doesn't even know where yet. This is normal. There's been months of this already, long before Max came back, long before she was given her rage, all the hurt back. It passes.

But Max's eyes are empty too, which has never happened before. Which should never happen. A city has died so that Chloe could live, and now Max, too. That wasn't the deal. That was never supposed to be an option. But maybe there was never any choosing to begin with. Maybe whatever has always burned in Max, whatever keeps drawing Chloe back to her like a moth to a flame, maybe it was always meant to be extinguished. Maybe Max's choice just means Chloe gets to see it.

She stops the car and puts her hand on Max's shoulder, gentle. She had forgotten how it feels, to touch with care. To hold something in your shaking hands and know, tenderly but without fear, that you will not break it. Not wish. Not hope. _Know_.

There was more than one reason why she put the snow doe away.

Max looks back at her, gently framed by the dying sunlight and suddenly close enough to _really_ touch, and for a second, only a second, Chloe thinks she can see the ghost of a smile in her face. A hint of a spark.

And through the emptiness, something comes, so slowly and quietly that she can barely trust herself to see it properly.

Hope.

They drive past the Arcadia Bay sign and Chloe can breathe again.

David calls at the first motel they stop at.

Joyce doesn't call at all.

At the second motel, Max tells her to leave.

Well, she doesn't. Not exactly.

What she does say is _you don't have to stay, you know_ , and Chloe can taste the fear in the back of her throat. _Signing contracts under duress and all_. But that's Max for you, a perfect mind-reader when it comes to Chloe's most obscure motivations, and all about reading too deeply where she's just being honest. Chloe wants to tell her there hasn't been a single day since her father's death when she _hasn't_ been under duress, but she knows Max better than that.

She takes her hand, looks straight into her eyes, finds the spark. She remembers the words like they were branded on her skin, _I'll always be with you, forever_ , she says again, and Max is shaking and then she's sobbing and Chloe pulls her close and holds her, and she doesn't know how to tell her that it's always been her, even before her father and Rachel and David and her spiraling life, before the storm, Max has always been her lighthouse. As inescapable as Arcadia's, as safe, whether there was darkness or not.

She doesn't know how to tell her that after she kissed Rachel for the very first time, Rachel held her face in her hands, stared seemingly straight into her soul, and asked her who she was waiting for. And Chloe knew, immediately, and felt Max's absence in the space between her ribs like an ache.

So she holds Max until she stops shaking and she says nothing, and thinks nothing, until they both slip into sleep.

They both still smell like the storm.

They dream of the storm, too.

Max's choice is replayed over and over again behind their eyelids. Chloe dreams only of standing by the lighthouse staring at the storm, Max's hand in hers, Max in her arms. How fragile Max felt in that moment, breakable for the first time ever, no core of steel underneath the softness. It feels calm, and right, and it doesn't feel real. But Max, Max dreams of a dying city, people she helped to safety and then abandoned, lives that were saved only to be taken. Max dreams of choosing Chloe.

She dreams of choosing the bay once, too.

Chloe wakes up to her vomiting in the bathroom, shaky and desperate to bury her face in Chloe's shoulder, to hold onto her so tight that Chloe can feel the shape of her fingers for days after.

She doesn't bother asking about regret. Most of the motel has already heard Max's answer.

Seattle is just as Max described it, just as Chloe imagined through the few postcards she got to receive.

Max's room feels like home in a way that is hard to describe, but also alien, at least until Max throws herself on the bed and Chloe looks at the framed picture of them as kids hanging on top of her, the half-faded poster of a pretentious indie band Chloe has never heard of but Max probably raved about for months. There's a notepad on the bedside table and it's open on a page full of ink blots where Max wonders whether she should go by Maxine in Blackwell. For what Chloe can make out, the pros list says _fancy?_ , but the cons says _Chloe will never let me live it down_.

Chloe has that notepad on her knees when David calls again, flips through it absently as he tells her about Joyce. Max is sitting by her on the bed and sketches a little fox and a thought bubble with a question mark in it. Chloe takes the pen from her hand and underlines the question mark. They don't know when Joyce is going to wake up. They don't even know if she will.

 _Waffles?_ , Max writes on the notepad. The spark is back in her eyes, most of the times at least.

No more leaving.

They make waffles with Joyce's recipe, and they don't taste quite like hers, but neither of them says it out loud. Max takes her hand in hers under the table and Chloe almost, _almost_ smiles.

Sometimes Max's eyes unfocus and Chloe knows, _always_ knows where she goes, and that she's not invited. Chloe pulls her back to her again and again, back home where she's loved and she can't be hurt and she never, ever has to make choices that will tear her apart.

It takes months, but eventually she starts smiling again. And, like magic, so does Chloe.

The photographs take longer to return.

The first one is of Chloe.

They're laying on Max's bed and it's early, too early, but they've been awake for hours and the smell of eggs and bacon slides under the door. Their heads are so close together that their hair is intertwined on the pillow, Chloe's greenish waves brushing against Max's dark shores. Max has her pinky wrapped around Chloe's in a promise that she hasn't yet voiced. She's looking at the camera on the bedside table, untouched for months but weekly handled with care.

Chloe is looking at Max.

Max, who stretches out her arm and takes the camera with tentative hands. Max, who raises it over their heads and points it at Chloe, and Chloe lets her, and she doesn't look away from Max's face, and when she hears the shutter her eyes fill with tears and she can smell the storm, but also every moment of happiness she's ever had.

She thinks of the smell of Max's hair when Max leaned in to kiss her. Her heart opens its eyes to the world and stretches with a yawn, then restarts, late and way too fast as if to make up for it.

The photo is the perfect snapshot of longing, fear, and hope all wrapped up and painted on a face that isn't used to being honest about feelings anymore.

It's hard to tell who goes in for the kiss first.

Max tastes like the sea, or maybe Chloe's tears, and her hands are warm and soft on Chloe's face, they're holding it so tenderly that Chloe _shakes shakes shakes_ right out of her skin and into Max's arms. But Max is shaking too, and when they pull away she's staring at Chloe with a blush high on her cheeks and her nose wrinkled in confusion in that very specific way that Chloe sees in her _dreams_ sometimes.

They kiss again, and again, and a hundred times.

By breakfast, the photo has been pinned to the bedroom wall. It's the first of many.

Weeks later, Chloe's digging for her skull socks in the depths of their drawer and finds a brand new diary, and she doesn't mean to, she really doesn't, but she finds herself opening it and miracle of miracles, there's Max's handwriting, _Chloe KISSED ME. Or maybe I kissed her? I guess we have years to argue about it_. She stops reading, fishes her socks out and closes the drawer.

But she smiles all the way to dinner.

Storms come and go.

They turn their phones off and close the blinds, let music play loud, make forts out of blankets in the dark. Also in the dark, their hands meet.

Then they meet other warm skin.

Then nothing means anything, except for Max's soft breathing and her trembling body, and her fingers trailing heat over the curve of Chloe's hipbone and down, _down_ , and her mouth on Chloe's and Chloe's on hers, and then just on _her_.

They visit Los Angeles, for Rachel. Then Arcadia Bay, for her funeral.

Chloe brings flowers and a broken friendship bracelet, and Max, a photograph of an empty field. _There's a doe_ , she tells Chloe, even though there most definitely isn't, like it makes any more sense that way.

Then somehow, impossibly, they visit Rachel's grave one more time before they leave for Seattle and there's a doe sitting beside it, watching them with big, solemn eyes.

Max takes the shot and the doe doesn't stir.

They get a flat in San Francisco. Max submits her latest photo to a contest, wins, gets her work in an exposition. Then another. Then another, and another. Then Chloe rents the building next to it and sets up a tattoo and piercings parlor, and the first thing she does in it is cover up most of her old arm tattoo. The second thing is tattoo a blue butterfly over it. The third, the very same butterfly, on Max's right shoulder.

Chloe lets her hair turn green, then blond, then blue again.

They make new friends. They welcome old ones, mostly Max's and only those who survived. Frank, once, bright eyes and a button-up, his arm wrapped around his bride-to-be. Max's parents, as often as they can drive over. David, first only at Christmas, then much, much more often with Joyce by his side.

Chloe gets a new truck and Max has nightmares for a month. Then they fade away like a photograph in the rain, and they never speak of it again.

Their bedroom walls are covered in memories. Seattle and Arcadia and Los Angeles and the roadtrip after Rachel's funeral, and those that were rescued from the storm many weeks later, still curling at the edges from the water damage. It's in front of that wall that Chloe asks Max to marry her, and it's that wall on the background of the photograph Chloe takes right after with her father's old camera, Max's eyes bright from tears and the spark that was never extinguished.

A year later, as they're exchanging vows in Seattle, a blue butterfly lands on the flower crown on Max's head. It bats its wings once, maybe twice. Then it flies away.

They kiss among a storm of applause.


End file.
